Old Man’s Cave and Izbândiş Spring

In my last post (which was way too long ago) I talked about a small one-day trip we took to the Northern part of the Western Carpathians of Romania (you can see the post here). As you can see, I only told you half the story, the rest is still behind! I’ll start by saying that after the water-fun we climbed for about an hour or so to reach the peak of the Padurea Craiului mountain which turned out to be very rocky. Nevertheless, it was worth the climb because the view was beautiful, in a very humble way: a little railroad catching up with the river, surrounded by endless forests:

I really loved the serenity of the place, looking around from the top of the large rocks..On the photo below you can see how we looked like from the side (photo courtesy of my teacher, Imecs Zoltan):

We didn’t stay there long, because we had other places to visit. Continuing our journey through the forest (which seemed never-ending), after another half hour of trekking the trees finally gave way to a path less crowded. We had to capture this change in the ambiance, a photo which became of my favorites of the trip: (the white dog you see in the picture was picked up from another tour group we met along the way and it seemed like he liked us more than the others, so he decided to lead the way)

Although trekking and visiting caves was our main priority, I must remind you that this was a trip with the University with a professor that used to teach us karstology and insisted that caves are not the only formations in karst surfaces. He quickly drew our attention towards sinkholes, which soak up the water from the surface:

And here you can see the sinkholes in proportion to us, the poor hungry and thirsty tourists who couldn’t wait to have their next stop and find some shade (pretty huge,right?):

After a whole Spring of rain and cold, we weren’t expecting such high temperature that day (thus my black T-shirt and long pants which I eventually tucked up), so the warm and strong sun caught us by surprise. Although the forest seemed endless, I still liked it better because it had a lot of shade, unlike the road we were on afterwards. But we still got to Old Man’s Cave safe and sound, and enjoyed a little picnic while we were resting. You can’t actually enter the cave, because it doesn’t have such big holes as the Zichy did, so while we were soothing our hunger and thirst we were admiring it from the outside.

The sun heated up even more as we gathered ourselves towards our final destination, Izbandis Spring, considered to be Romania’s deepest spring (90 meters). The road was tough, I got a really bad sunburn afterwards, but I can tell you it was worth it. You may pass it if you don’t go close enough, but if you do, you can see the water is of a beautiful turquoise color, and after a few steps (where the water’s turquoise) you might end up getting wet (it is said to be 3-4 meters deep there).

There is also a cave next to it with the same name, but you can only reach the magical land of the dripstone cave after an hour of crawling through a small hole, so it’s only advisable for experienced spelunkers. It is also said that they’ve found some poisonous gases leaking in the cave’s paths so I don’t really recommend exploring it, unless you’re a professional.